Novell and Microsoft recently entered into an agreement regarding software patents (really?) that betrays the rest of the Free Software community, including the very people who wrote Novell's own system, for Novell's sole financial beneift, according to Bruce Perens. Join Perens in signing an open letter to Novell's CEO Ron Hovsepian. "As the agreement stands today, it betrays the authors of the software you re-market and their users worldwide for Novell's sole commercial benefit."

If ideology is a collection of ideas, then to not be driven by ideology would mean that one is not driven by ideas. What exactly is the alternative? To be idealess? I'm not sure that is something you want to admit to.

You imply, by your statement, that profit motives are somehow non-ideological. I regret to inform you that the pursuit of wealth above all else _is_ an ideology, and your statement is nothing more than a superficial con to present Free Software in a bad light by manipulating semantics.

If ideology is a collection of ideas, then to not be driven by ideology would mean that one is not driven by ideas. What exactly is the alternative? To be idealess? I'm not sure that is something you want to admit to.

The problem isn't ideology, per se. It's narrow-minded ideology, that won't consider the viewpoint of others. I think that few people would consider Perens to be anything other than a zealot. He doesn't like companies like Microsoft (and he was fired from HP for his stridency) and, consequently, he has allowed his opposition to cloud the legitimate interests of another member of the OSS community.